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More goodness from Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration: Email Studio adds Mail Merge and Email Scheduler Directly in Gmail. “Introducing Email Studio, our new open-source Gmail add-on that brings powerful capabilities like mail merge, email scheduler, copier and more to your Gmail mailbox. Unlike other solutions, Email Studio works directly in Gmail and you can even use it inside the Gmail App on your Android phone (with support for iPhone coming soon).”

Digital Trends: LinkedIn lets you send voice messages that probably no one will listen to. “If sending out an unprompted LinkedIn message to a connection you barely know isn’t awkward enough, don’t worry — there’s more where that came from. The job-focused social network has now made it possible for users to send voice messages to connections, effectively the 21st-century answer to the cold call. Really, it’s just getting harder and harder to avoid people these days.”

USEFUL STUFF

Moz: Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Chapter 2: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking . “It’s been a few months since our last share of our work-in-progress rewrite of the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, but after a brief hiatus, we’re back to share our draft of Chapter Two with you! This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Kameron Jenkins, who has thoughtfully contributed her great talent for wordsmithing throughout this piece.”

Quartz: Those hurt by Facebook write open letters to Mark Zuckerberg because nothing else works. “Facebook says it’s ‘close’ to banning Alex Jones’s InfoWars, a website notorious for spreading for conspiracy theories, including that the deadly 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in the US was a hoax. The decision comes as pressure from journalists intensified in recent weeks. But those who were most affected by InfoWars claims have been asking the company to act for years, to no avail.”

BBC: Google: An A to Z of search results. “The vast majority are for complete words or phrases. But premature pushes of the enter key mean many end up being for single letters too. Most of us simply go back and try again. But some of those unique-character searches throw up intriguing results and serve as a snapshot of popular culture.”

Forbes: Instagram Zoo: The Rise and Rise Of Pet Influencers. “Move over cats with your videos! The influencer race is taking over the pet kingdom. Accounts for animals now often outperform verified humans on Instagram. However, it takes more than a devoted owner with a smartphone to get Instafamous. The rise of furry superstars on social media began more than a decade ago. Today, pet influencers merge the perfect formula of clickbait and memes and tie that with branding knowhow. Pet celebrities, like Juniper Foxx, Mr. Pokee the Hedgehog, Hamlet The Piggy or Pumpkin The Raccoon, spend their days starring in endorsement deals worth $2000+ per post.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: NSA has yet to fix security holes that helped Snowden leaks. “Edward Snowden’s success in leaking NSA data was chalked up in part to the agency’s own security lapses, so you’d think that the agency would have tightened up its procedures in the past five years… right? Apparently not. The NSA Inspector General’s office has published an audit indicating that many of the Snowden-era digital security policies still haven’t been addressed, at least as of the end of March 2018. It hasn’t correctly implemented two-person access controls for data centers and similar rooms, doesn’t properly check job duties and has computer security plans that are either unfinished or inaccurate.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Pew (PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!): Moderates in Congress go local on Facebook more than the most ideological members. “While highly ideological members of Congress tend to use their Facebook posts to criticize political opponents and support their allies, moderate lawmakers are more likely to concentrate on local issues in their outreach on the platform, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis covering Jan. 1, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2017.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Assistant is More Accurate Than Alexa, Siri, and Cortana. “Google Assistant is the most accurate smartphone digital assistant, beating Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft Cortana. A report released this week from Loup Ventures contains data from a digital assistant test, which measures how well the four competitors answered a series of 800 queries.”

Wired: I’m Deleting All My Old Tweets Because Nothing Matters. “While I gave birth to my first child in 2015, my brother sat across the street from the hospital in a bar, live tweeting his experience of waiting to meet his nephew. As the hours of my long labor wore on, my brother got drunker and his jokes more off the wall. When my son was finally born and I went to send an email birth announcement, I found that everyone already knew. Emails had flooded my inbox already congratulating me. My colleagues had all been following along with my brother’s live tweets. The second my son was born, word had reached them—and thousands of other people.” Good evening, Internet…

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